Ancients 1: Death Watch

Developer(s)	Farr-Ware
Publisher(s)	Epic Games
Platform(s)	DOS, Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows 98
Release	1993
Genre(s)	Role playing game
Mode(s)	Single-player

Released in August of 1993, Ancients 1: Deathwatch was a first person, Medieval/Magic turn based RPG for the PC.

Storyline

Beginning in the village of Locklaven, players are introduced to a beautiful harp playing fairy who puts you into a magically enchanted sleep. Upon waking, the player "senses" that the woman was kidnapped and upon returning to the village, learns that a great evil has begun assulting the city from the sewers below.

Gameplay

Ancients was a standard fare dungeon crawl with a simplified Dungeons and Dragons element of character creation including Fighter, Priest, Wizard, Rogue classes; Elf, Human, Dwarf, Giant races; and the rerollable statistics of Hitpoints, Gold, Intelligence, Strength, Constitution and Dexterity. Players are allowed a maximum of 4 characters in their party.

The world is a static grid based system with the top level being the relatively safe town of Locklaven including an Inn to recover hitpoints and mana and listen to rumors, a trading shop to purchase gear, a casino to gamble, a church to heal and ressurect lost characters, and a guild to level characters. Beneath the village is a sewer system followed by a number of different levels corresponding to increasingly difficult monsters.

Combat is randomly triggered by walking through the dungeon and is turn based allowing the player characters to attack first. Combat choices include a Basic Melee Attack, Defend, Flee and Magic. Player characters are effectively lined up in a square for combat with the left and right most characters lined up in back and the middle two characters in front, meaning in combat only the middle two characters can use melee attacks while the left and right most characters must attack from range or use magic.

Magic is broken down into the two primary classes of Priest and Wizard. There are 5 accessible tiers of magic usage for each class and access to each tier is based upon character level.

Leveling occurs when characters recieve enough experience from slaying monsters to reach the next level tier. Players must then travel back up to the city of Locklaven and visit the Guild. There are no specific quests other than the storyline driven rescue.

Sequal

A sequel was created, Ancients 2: Approaching Evil, however this game has nothing to do with the original game and has a new concept in storyline.

See also

• List of roleplaying games
• List of MS-DOS games

External links

• Download Ancients at the Mobygames Archive, $Ancients.zip
• Review of Ancients 1: Deathwatch(Hosted by RealVG)
• Ancients 1: Deathwatch at MobyGames